The forty two-yr vintage, Suchi Mukherjee is presently the proud founding father of LimeRoad.Com – a portal that goals the girls target audience, is a amusing and exciting manner to discover, percentage and store lifestyle merchandise!
A ladies of substance that Suchi is, continually expected of constructing and growing organizations that are focused on easy but powerful consumer merchandise, and she has successfully introduced this dream to existence no longer only within the past but most currently at LimeRoad as well.
She should see that on line product discovery was a grave trouble amongst many Indian women and wanted to do something about it. With LimeRoad, she now not simplest fulfils her dream of creating the most giant pleasant discovery platform for life-style products, but additionally solves a pain-factor for lots.
Personally, she has completed her Bachelors in Arts with specialization in Economics and Maths from the University of Cambridge and additionally holds a Masters Degree in Finance & Economics from the London School of Economics.
Being a married girl with two children, Suchi no longer simplest has managed to gain what she desired to, but has additionally grow to be an suggestion for lots of young women who wish to pursue their goals and paintings for alternate.
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Life as an worker…
Suchi began her profession soon after she completed her Masters!
The first organization she selected to begin her journey with changed into Lehman Brothers Inc in July 1998, as their new Senior Associate for Corporate Finance. She persisted working for them for extra than five years and targeted on sectors consisting of Telecoms Media Technology and Financial Institutions.
After she won the favored information, she decided to transport some place else, to grab onto the possibilities that were but to be opened and in June 2003, she joined “Virgin Media” as a Director for Change & Business Development. She was additionally the member in their Consumer Division Management Team.
Suchi labored with them for almost 2 years and then took one of the wisest decisions of her life; She cease Virgin Media and joined “eBay”!
This soar not only helped her develop in terms of role but additionally gave her immense & first-hand understanding of the functioning’s of enterprise.
She joined the enterprise first because the Head of Business Seller Programs & CS inside the yr 2006 and was the member of the UK Operating Management Team as nicely. With the manner she completed, she changed into quickly promoted inside a yr, as the Director and Member of Executive Management Team for “Skype”, which back then turned into a part of eBay Inc.
Her duties now also protected making plans, product / UI layout, payments of the product a.K.A. Skype and additionally searching after its advertising consisting of brand, channels incl. PR and CS. This became altogether a one of a kind learning curve for Suchi. Being a part of the govt management crew; right here is where she simply discovered the effective leadership improvement abilties. She were given the priceless opportunity to look the transition of a start-up from founder–led and with three CEO modifications in just 2 years. Not to overlook the drastic upgradation of the product.
If this changed into fascinating, then what came subsequent would sweep you off your feet!
After giving almost two years to Skype; she once more got the possibility to get promoted as the new Managing Director for “Gumtree,” which again became part of eBay Inc.
I bet universe was covertly education her to start something tremendous of her very own! Because Gumtree being a start-up; Suchi had again were given the possibility to build and develop a company but this time, together with her very own palms and management skills.
Now Gumtree required a transformational management, and in her complete stint with them, she spent most of the time scaling the crew competencies, product, sales, advertising and marketing and CS features, and at the same time Suchi additionally re-dependent the financials towards center revenue streams.
And with 13-million users, she went on to grow it to UK’s largest horizontal classifieds commercial enterprise in just two years. She lifted the business enterprise from a No. 3 role to a marketplace main position in jobs and client-to-customer vehicle income, and additionally grew the visits by 35% YOY.
Once that turned into completed, she decided to transport on and do some thing of her very own!
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Life as an entrepreneur…
Now even though she was operating for one of the most reputed agencies and changed into actually residing the dream of many, however she nonetheless felt that she wasn’t justifying her goals.
She desperately wanted to do some thing of her personal, something which could fill the distance in the society, something that might fulfil the wishes of many and to so – she built LimeRoad.Com!
To come up with a truthful concept; LimeRoad is absolutely a social-commerce platform that objectives the female target market of these days and makes it a laugh and interesting to discover, share and shop from their substantial listing of merchandise.
The website online offers a number a number of the most revolutionary, precise and thrilling lifestyle merchandise across categories like apparel, add-ons, home and non-perishable food collected from carefully decided on retailers.
Interestingly, it has a unique concept of a hundred% consumer generated content material that is created by using its scrapbooking community and is different to LimeRoad. That manner all the goods that you see at the website online are manufactured through the customers of the website itself called the – scrapbooking network.
This progressive scrapbook application gives human beings the leverage to pick from their range of products, create a completely unique look, proportion it with their pals and also can promote their curated looks & earn out of it. So essentially on LimeRoad all and sundry & every person is a stylist.
I. Ideation
Surprisingly, the idea of LimeRoad.Com become born out of a moment of utter frustration – she become reading a sleek mag in London and observed a piece of jewellery that she favored, and wanted to buy it, however because it became from some small store in Mumbai, it obviously wouldn’t have reached to her whenever soon.
That is when she realised very important matters:
- There become no patron generation that made the discovery of cute accessories and products clean and enjoyable. You realize, much like analyzing a mag, and flipping pages or pictures in an album.
- And most importantly, there has been no platform from which one should get entry to the list’s of merchandise that have been manufactured and shipped out of India, one of the international’s largest manufacturing hubs. Basically, India remained disconnected from the virtual global.
That is whilst the concept started to accumulate in her head!
She wanted to build a platform in which one ought to find gorgeous, low cost way of life products in an extremely easy to discover interface. She being a woman, knew that girls love the distinctive and out-of-the-box stuff, and that product discovery in life-style was certainly a totally difficult trouble to remedy.
What made her even greater assured turned into that India returned then accounted for greater than 21% production of way of life products of world (that’s 21% of a almost $1 trillion enterprise). And she desired to capitalize on this untapped possibility. Her aim turned into to simply bring all of the vendors who produce excessive nice low priced products underneath one roof, through an clean to apply interface to permit the discovery.
Once she was clear inside the head with the idea; she flew all the way down to India!
Returning lower back to her home-floor; Suchi first met her friend Ankush Mehra, Head of Supply Chain – Reliance Hypermarkets, to apprehend the difficulties of putting in place a enterprise in India and to rope him in as his first co-founder.
Next become her meeting with Prashant Mallik – Ex-Facebook, Microsoft & Siemens. He had flown all the way down to India after 17 years, once more with a dream to construct some thing of his very own. And obviously he joined the team as their techie co-founder.
They also roped-in some other people like: Ahti Heinla as their Technical Advisor (beyond: Founding Architect of Skype) & Michael V Swaaij as their Advisor (beyond: ex-Chairman of Skype)
And with that they take to each other! LimeRoad went stay in October 2012!
II. Challenges
Now much like each begin-up; LimeRoad too faced their proportion of demanding situations, throughout their initial ranges. Even even though those weren’t that primary, but while coming from a totally different enterprise environment, those can truely get into one’s head.
At the very beginning, locating the proper humans to build a strong group which changed into a mixture of talent and may-do mind-set become one in every of the largest demanding situations for LimeRoad. Although this hassle did get solved in the end, but it does have a tendency to popup from time to time!
Another element that pestered them lots was, getting the right sort of infrastructure with excessive- velocity & dependable net.
Other than that; complex bank technique, getting the enterprise registered with the RoC (Registrar of Companies) manner, and other criminal formalities were also something that turned out to be very exceptional from what that they had visible.
Anyways, some of these got sorted then and there, at the same time as a few are nevertheless taking place; but they decided to transport on, due to the fact as they are saying “Life is going on!”
III. Growth & Development
Moving in advance; their sales version turned into pretty a good deal easy: they made cash when providers sell i.E. Fee sales (% of income). Hence, they began off via that specialize in building an superb product.
They also went out of their consolation sector to construct sturdy partnerships with a honestly rich choice of manufacturers and with classes like apparel, add-ons, domestic and meals, LimeRoad was being offered to be a female’s “me time”, but on line.
They released with many brands, out of which nearly half have been completely available with them. These covered countrywide and international mega brands in their flagship shape, Home-grown manufacturers by means of exporters of world-elegance-merchandise, etc. Including 5elements, Vedas, Fuchsia, Anuva, Desi Weaves, Kshitij, Allen Solly, Forever sixteen, Trendz, and plenty of greater.
And seeing that then; the platform has grown from — 250,000+ gadgets of precise user generated visual content according to month, and 600+ vendors; to posting of two hundred,000+ specific merchandise and looks in keeping with month by way of the customers, and turning into India’s main discovery platform for way of life products with 18 million products.
Additionally, they these days rolled out their new Android app and in no time have were given 100,000+ downloads with customers returning 7 times/ month, and cell now debts for 60% of users and revenues as nicely. Because of such tendencies, their sales have additionally doubled within the final 4 months with 0 marketing strategies.
With a sturdy group of two hundred+ IIT-techies to NIFT-layout geeks, LimeRoad stands tall with 1.Five million scrapbooks published with the aid of customers to date, and a hundred,000 scrapbooks made in step with day. Their Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) has additionally grown by way of a big 600% because their release.
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The business enterprise now objectives to reach out to 400m+ smartphones by using around in 2016, out of which 30-50% belonging to ladies.
Talking about funding; the agency has raised a total of whopping $50 Million from Tiger Global, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners India and some others. Their maximum recent funding includes the collection C round of $30 Million, earlier than which that they had raised $15 Million and $five Million, in collection B & collection A respectively.
Achievements
- Voted 1 of 15 ‘Rising Talent – global leaders below 40′ at World Women’s Forum Global Women’s Forum